De la Isla: Unrest greets Mexico's new president

MEXICO CITY — Elia Andrade Rojas and I sat on a bench on Avenida Juarez last Saturday. She was telling me about her collective, Bordando Por La Paz, and its mission to embroider handkerchiefs memorializing the dead and missing in Mexico’s drug war. The collective exhibited these panuelos along two city blocks, across the street from the Monument of Benito Juarez. Hundreds of pedestrians stopped to read them.

Elia is a lovely 35-year-old. “Do a headshot,” I told John Reed Brundage, editor of the Mexico Voices blog, who was taking photos. “Be sure to get her nose ring.”

The collective originally planned to put up its silent but moving demonstration in the Zocalo, the national square across the street from the National Palace.

But the square was closed off to public demonstrations that day. Enrique Pea Nieto was to arrive there after being sworn in as president that morning across town. The Felipe Caldern administration, responsible for the drug war’s escalation, was leaving office.

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Pea Nieto faces widespread dissatisfaction. Many see the new president’s election as the return of authoritarian rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, by its Spanish initials). PRI had held power for 71 years until 2000, when it was defeated by the opposition National Action Party (PAN). PAN’s failures -- rather than the PRI’s assurances of rehabilitation from its authoritarian ways -- put the old party back in power.

The new iron benches, including the one on which Elia and I talked, were part of the Alameda Park’s renovations in this city’s cultural heart. The park had just reopened three days before, with new walkways. The gardens and greenways had been replanted, trees pruned. Several water-fountain statues and collection basins were refinished.

Elia also founded the Fuentes Rojas collective, named for an action a year ago in which participants put red dye in public fountains to protest civilian deaths from Mexico’s drug-war escalation. “The barbarism had to end,” she reflected on that first action.

The embroidered handkerchief project began in August 2011, with two major public displays in the next five months. Last March, the embroidery, intended to attest to each individual violent death, was taken up at Parque Rojo in Guadalajara and subsequent states. Thousands have been done.

Organizers hope to ultimately have as many as 90,000, “one handkerchief, one victim,” Elia reflects. “Constructing peace survives the memory of destructiveness, which comes much more rapidly.”

The project was her response to the drug-related killings. She’d heard MarÝa Rivera’s protest poem, “The Dead,” which says: “They are called / the dead that no one knows that no one saw killed.” Rivera’s poem objected to anonymous death, victims’ names going mostly unknown.

The pauelos are intended to undo that.

This was the street battle of conscience I had expected to witness. What does a handkerchief, embroidered in red and green thread — testament to a terminated life — mean to someone else’s family and friends and colleagues, the strangers, the presumed uninvolved?

Elia was telling me about the poem when the first explosion went off, like a muffled ceremonial cannon.

A collective member interrupted to say they should take down the exhibit. Elia said they could take it a dozen blocks away to the Monument to the Revolution.

When the second explosion went off, closer, I lost sight of Elia.

The crowd was running away from the Historical District when there was a third explosion, a tear-gas petard. Reed and I went toward the district and its Palace of Fine Arts. A line of riot police had formed in front of it.

As most people retreated, up came combatants. Some wore bandanas over their faces. They wore improvised helmets. Some held wooden shields or garbage can lids. They appeared to be in their 20s. Men and women alike, they held metal bars like swords.

“íLas piedras, guey!” One hollered to the others to gather bricks from construction sites.

Molotov cocktails flew sporadically.

The rebels set up street barricades of metal crowd-control barriers that had been used during the park renovation to keep people out and now from crossing the street. they unbolted the ornate iron benches to thwart police advances.

The frontline combatants kept up a barrage of assaults with stones, bricks, glass and more Molotov cocktails. The rebels were daring, the police restrained.

The street rhetoric was fervent as it spoke to democratic wishes and social fairness. Elected federal and local officials of all parties promised to seek prosecutions for the vandalism.

Some 65 people were detained on vandalism charges and 21 people were injured, El Universal, one of this city’s major dailies, later reported.

During the fracas, Elvira MartÝnez Herrera, 60, a thin, frail woman with a low voice, stood beside heavily shielded riot police near the monument. She held up the stained image of a Mexican eagle. Six more years of the same isn’t possible, she said, adding that Mexico, a wunderkind of world finance, needed to bring its global accomplishments to the neighborhood level.

Jose de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. His next book, “The Rise of Latino Political Power,” is scheduled to publish in early 2013. Email joseisla3yahoo.com.